Talk:William Byrd/Archive 1

Renaissance or Modern Age?
William Byrd lived in the 16th and 17th century. What does the author mean by "composer of the Renaissance"? His style? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.135.163.193 (talk) 18:11, 3 November 2011 (UTC)

Books
I'm doing a project on William Byrd. Does anyone know some of his works, and if any of them are on print.google.com or another website for free? Also, I would appreciate any information about Colonial Literature in reference to William Byrd. Thanks

A. Mirza

elegy on the death of tallis
The article should make some mention that Byrd wrote Elegy on the Death of Tallis given the close relationship they had.

Birth year
On a CD I just bought, the birth year of William Bird (that's how they spelt it) is 1543. I don't know where they got this year, but perhaps they were right?

Mm, I've seen on a couple of different sites (stainer.co.uk and classical.net) that his birth year is listed as 1539. RedZionX 04:31, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Under Elizabeth and James
It was a minor edit, but still felt that previous wording allowed for anachronistic modern bias. I removed the "staunchly" in front of "protestant" in describing Elizabeth's political and religious disposition. Describing Edward as "staunchly" is correct; describing Elizabeth as such ignores recent scholarship. Gmdisalvo 02:39, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

This article is unbalanced and in serious need of updating. There is a heavy concentration on Byrd's biography and on the (admittedly important) topic of his relationship to the religion and politics of his day. But tthere is far too little crittical discussion of the music itself, and the instrumental music and the many English songs of various descriptions are hardly discussed at all. I might have a go at recttifying matters sometime in the nextt few weeks if nobody minds. —Preceding unsigned comment added by D Humphreys (talk • contribs) 18:41, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

I have deleted the old article on William Byrd and substituted one of my own.

David Humphreys —Preceding unsigned comment added by D Humphreys (talk • contribs) 09:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

This article is poorly organized into huge blocks of text and I cannot see how it meets Wikipedia standards, so somebody please fix it because it is impossible to find anything in it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.102.83.38 (talk) 01:16, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Some people call them paragraphs.

David —Preceding unsigned comment added by D Humphreys (talk • contribs) 13:01, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Someone please fix the article ... its current state is horrendous. AppaAliApsa 04:06, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Competing articles war should cease
A few days ago, D Humphreys completely replaced the then Byrd article with one of his own (apparently under the anonymous 86.31.136.17), obliterating the otheruses template at the top and all the references and links from the Media, See also, References, External links, and categories. Ariedartin rightly reverted the MoS-breaking replacement and placed a notice on User talk:86.31.136.17 explaining the reasons for the reversion. A few hours later, D Humphrerys reverted Ariedartin's reversion.

What D Humphreys fails to understand is that his replacement article is inappropriate both in terms of style and content, even though it includes much valuable information. His article has no sectioning or organization typical of a Wikipedia article, and the elimination of all those references mentioned above in favor of a list of books is totally out of character.

Humphreys stated elsewhere on this talk page that the original article is unbalanced towards biography and the relationship to religion and politics of Byrd's day, with too little discussion of the music itself. By contrast Humphreys' text seems to be unbalanced in the other direction.

What D Humpreys should do is to merge his material with that in the original article before he replaced it. The brewing reversion war should cease.

-- Chuck (talk) 17:18, 27 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Tend to agree - IMHO, whatever its other merits, the Humphreys article appears to be just an un-wikified slab of text, and needs to go into his sandbox for a couple of days whilst he and helpers try to produce a worthwhile merge. Bob aka Linuxlad (talk) 22:05, 27 August 2008 (UTC)

Here is the text of my replacement article. It has been suggested that I should post it here and ask somebody to format it in accordance with Wikipedia standards. Could somebody do so please?

Byrd, William English composer, born London c. 1540, died Stondon Massey, Essex, 4 July 1623, English singer, organist and composer.

Provenance
Our knowledge of Byrd’s biography has expanded in recent years, thanks largely to the researches of John Harley (Harley, 1997). Following the discovery of a document dated 2 October 1598 in which Byrd’s age is given as ‘58 years of ther abouts’ it now appears that he was born in 1540 or late 1539. The older dating 1542-3 is derived from Byrd’s will (endorsed on 22 November 1622) which describes him as ‘in the 80th yeare of myne age’. It now becomes clear that it must have been drafted about three years earlier than the date of endorsement. Byrd was born in London (not Lincolnshire as previously supposed), the son of a Thomas Byrd (not Thomas Byrd of the Chapel Royal) about whom little is known. Byrd had two brothers, Symond and John, and four sisters. It is clear from a reference in the prefatory material in the Tallis/Byrd Cantiones of 1575 that Byrd was a pupil of Thomas Tallis, then the leading composing member of the Chapel Royal Choir. Byrd also worked in collaboration with two other Chapel Royal singingmen, John Sheppard and William Mundy, on one of his earliest compositions, a contribution to a joint setting of the alternatim psalm In exitu Israel composed for the procession to the font at the Paschal Vigil. As an item for the Sarum liturgy this was presumably composed near the end of the reign of Mary Tudor (1553-1558), whose Catholic beliefs impelled her to revive Sarum liturgical practices during her brief reign. In view of these contacts it is reasonable to speculate that Byrd was a Chapel Royal choirboy, though unfortunately the surviving records do not name the choristers individually.

Early years
A few other compositions by Byrd should probably be assigned to his teenage years. Apart from his contribution to In exitu Israel (Similes illis fiant a4), these include his setting of the Easter responsary Christus resurgens (a4) which was not published until 1605, but which as another Sarum liturgical unit could also have been composed during Mary’s reign. Some of the hymns and antiphons for keyboard and for consort may also date from this period, though it is also possible that the consort pieces may have been composed in Lincoln for the musical training of choirboys.

Byrd’s first known professional employment was an organist and choirmaster of Lincoln Cathedral, a post which he held from 25 March 1563. Residing at 6 Minster Yard Lincoln, he remained in post until 1572. His period at Lincoln was not entirely trouble-free, for on 19 November 1569 the Dean and Chapter cited him for ‘certain matters alleged against him’ as the result of which his salary was suspended. Since Puritanism was influential at Lincoln, it is possible that the allegations were connected with over-elaborate choral polyphony or organ playing. A second directive dated 29 November issued detailed instructions regarding Byrd’s use of the organ in the liturgy. On 14 September 1568 Byrd married Julian Birley, a long-lasting and fruitful union which produced two sons and three daughters.

The 1560s were also important formative years for Byrd the composer. The Short Service, an unpretentious setting of items for the Anglican Matins, Communion and Evensong services, which seems to designed to comply with the Protestant reformers’ demand for clear words and simple musical textures, may well have been composed during the Lincoln years. It is at any rate clear that Byrd was composing Anglican church music, for when he left Lincoln the Dean and Chapter continued to pay him at a reduced rate on condition that he would send the cathedral his compositions. Byrd had also taken serious strides with instrumental music. The seven In Nomine settings for consort (two a4 and five (a5), at least one of the consort fantasias (Neighbour F1 a6) and a number of important keyboard works have been assigned to the Lincoln years. The latter include the Ground in Gamut (described as ‘Mr Byrd’s old ground’) by Thomas Tomkins, the A minor fantasia and probably the first of Byrd’s great series of keyboard pavans and galliards, a composition which was transcribed by Byrd from an original for five-part consort.   All these show Byrd gradually emerging as a major figure on the Elizabethan musical landscape.

Some sets of keyboard variations, such as The Hunt’s Up and the imperfectly preserved set on Gipsies’ Round also seem to be early works. As we have seen, Byrd had begun setting Latin liturgical texts as a teenager, and he seems to have continued to do so at Lincoln. Two exceptional large-scale psalm motets, Ad Dominum cum tribularer (a8) and Domine quis habitabit (a9) are Byrd’s contribution to a genre cultivated by Robert White and Robert Parsons. De lamentatione, another early work, is a contribution to the Elizabethan practice of setting groups of verses from the Lamentations of Jeremiah following the format of the Tenebrae lessons sung in the Catholic rite during the last three days of Holy Week, other contributors including Tallis, White, Parsley and the elder Ferrabosco. It is likely that this practice was an expression of Elizabethan Catholic nostalgia, as a number of the texts suggest.

The Chapel Royal
Byrd obtained the prestigious post of Gentleman of the Chapel Royal in 1572 following the death of Robert Parsons, a gifted composer who drowned in the Trent nearNewark on 25 January of that year. Almost from the outset Byrd is named as ‘organist’, which however was not a designated post but an occupation for any Chapel Royal member capable of filling it. This career move vastly increased Byrd’s opportunities to widen his scope as a composer and also to make contacts at Court. Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) was a moderate Protestant who eschewed the more extreme forms of Puritanism and retained a fondness for elaborate ritual, besides being a music lover and keyboard player herself. Byrd’s output of Anglican church music (defined in the strictest sense as sacred music designed for performance in church) is surprisingly small, but it stretches the limits of elaboration then regarded as acceptable by some reforming Protestants who regarded highly wrought music as a distraction from the Word of God.

Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantu {1575)r
In 1575 Byrd and Tallis were jointly granted a patent for the printing of music and ruled music paper for 21 years, one of a number of patents issued by the Crown for the printing of books on various subjects. The two musicians used the services of the French Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, who had settled in England and previously produced an edition of a collection of Lassus chansons in London (Receuil du mellange, 1570). The two monopolists took advantage of the patent to produce a grandiose joint publication under the title Cantiones que ab argumento sacrae vocantur consisting of 34 Latin motets dedicated to the Queen herself and accompanied by elaborate prefatory matter including poems in Latin elegiacs by the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster and the young courtier Ferdinand Heybourne (aka Richardson). There are 17 motets each by Tallis and Byrd, one for each years of the Queen’s reign.

Byrd’s contribution to the Cantiones is highly variegated in character. The inclusion of Laudate pueri (a6) which proves to be an instrumental fantasia with words added after composition, is one sign that Byrd had some difficulty in assembling enough material for the collection. Diliges Dominum (a8), which may also originally have been untexted, is an eight-in-four retrograde canon'' of little musical interest. Also belonging to the more archaic stratum of motets is Libera me Domine (a5), a cantus firmus setting of the ninth responsary at Matins for the Office for the Dead, which takes its point of departure from the setting by Robert Parsons, while Miserere mihi (a6), a setting of a Compline antiphon often used by Tudor composers for didactic cantus firmus exercises, incorporates a four-in-two canon. Tribue Domine (a6) is a large-scale sectional composition setting a from a medieval collection of Meditationes which was commonly attributed to St Augustine, composed in a style which owes much to earlier Tudor settings of votive antiphons as a mosaic of full and semichoir passages. Byrd sets it in three sections, each beginning with a semichoir passage in archaic style.

Byrd’s contribution to the Cantiones also includes compositions in a more forward-looking manner which point the way forwards to his motets of the 1580s. Some of them show the influence of the motets of Alfonso Ferrabosco I (1543-1588), a Bolognese musician who worked in the Tudor court at intervals between 1562 and 1578. Ferrabosco’s motets provided direct models for Byrd’s Emendemus in melius (a5), O lux beata Trinitas (a6), Domine secundum actum meum (a6) and Siderum rector (a5) as well as a more generalized paradigm for what Joseph Kerman has called Byrd’s ‘affective-imitative’ style, a method of setting pathetic texts in extended paragraphs based on subjects employing curving lines in fluid rhythm and contrapuntal techniques which Byrd learnt from his study of Ferrabosco.

The Cantiones were a financial failure. In 1577 Byrd and Tallis were forced to petition Queen Elizabeth for financial help pleading that the publication had ‘fallen oute to oure greate losse’ and that Tallis was now ‘verie aged’. They were subsequently granted the leasehold on various lands in East Anglia and the West Country for a period of 21 years.

Catholicism
From the early 1570s onwards Byrd became increasingly involved with Catholicism, which, as the scholarship of the last half-century has demonstrated, became a major factor in his personal and creative life. As John Harley has shown, it is probable that Byrd's parental family were Protestants, though whether by deeply-felt conviction or nominal conformism is not clear. Byrd himself may have held Protestant beliefs in his youth, for a recently discovered fragment of a setting of an English translation of Luther’s hymn Erhalt uns, Herr, bei Deinem Wort,  which bears an attribution to ‘Birde’ includes the line ‘From Turk and Pope defend us Lord’. However, from the 1570s onwards he is found associating with known Catholics, including Lord Thomas Paget, to whom he wrote a petitionary letter on behalf of an unnamed friend in 1573. Byrd’s wife Julian was first cited for recusancy (refusing to attend Anglican services) at Harlington in Middlesex, where the family now lived, in 1577. Byrd himself appears in the recusancy lists from 1584.

His involvement with Catholicism took on a new dimension in the 1580s.. Following Pius V’s Papal Bull of 1570, which absolved Elizabeth’s subjects from allegiance to her and effectively made her an outlaw in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, Catholicism became increasingly identified with sedition in the eyes of the Tudor authorities. With the influx of missionary priests trained in the English Colleges in Douai and Rome from the 1570s onwards relations between the authorities and the Catholic community took a further turn for the worse. Byrd himself is found in the company of prominent Catholics. In 1583 he got into serious trouble because of his association with Lord Thomas Paget, who was suspected of involvement in the Throckmorton Plot, and for sending money to Catholics abroad. As a result of this Byrd’s membership of the Chapel Royal was suspended for a time, restrictions were placed on his movements and his house was placed on the search list. In 1586 he attended a gathering at a country house which also included Father Henry Garnett (later executed for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot) and the Catholic poet [[Robert Southwell].

Byrd’s commitment to the Catholic cause found expression in his motets, of which he composed about 50 between 1575 and 1591. While the texts of the motets included by Byrd and Tallis in the 1575 Cantiones have a High Anglican doctrinal tone, scholars such as Joseph Kerman have detected a profound change of direction in the texts which Byrd set in the motets of the 1580s. In particular there is a persistent emphasis on themes such as the persecution of the chosen people (Domine praestolamur a5) the Babylonian or Egyptian captivity (Domine tu iurasti a5) and the long-awaited coming of deliverance (Laetentur caeli a5i, Circumspice Jerusalem a6) which has led scholars from Kerman onwards to believe that Byrd was reinterpreting biblical and liturgical texts in a contemporary context and writing laments and petitions on behalf of the persecuted Catholic community, which seems to have adopted Byrd as a kind of ‘house’ composer. Some texts should probably be interpreted as warnings against spies (Vigilate, nescitis enim a5) or lying tongues (Quis est homo a5) or celebration of the memory of martyred priests (O quam gloriosum a5). Byrd’s setting of the first four verses of Psalm 78 (Deus venerunt gentes a5) is widely believed to refer to the cruel execution of Fr Edmund Campion in 1581, an event which caused widespread revulsion on the Continent as well as in England. Finally, and perhaps most remarkably, Byrd’s Quomodo cantabimus (a8) is the result of a motet exchange between Byrd and Phillipe de Monte, who was director of music to the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II, in Prague. In 1583 De Monte sent Byrd his setting of verses 1-4 of Psalm 136 (Super flumina Babylonis a8), ending with the pointed question ’How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?’ Byrd replied the following year with a setting of the defiant continuation, set in eight parts and incorporating a three-part canon by inversion.

Cantiones sacrae (1589 and 1591)
Thirty-seven of Byrd’s motets were published in two sets of Cantiones sacrae, which appeared in 1589 and 1591. Together with two sets of English songs, discussed below, these collections, dedicated to powerful Elizabethan lords (Edward Somerset Earl of Worcester and John, Lord Lumley), probably formed part of Byrd’s campaign to re-establish himself in Court circles after the reverses of the 1580s. They may also reflect the fact that Byrd’s fellow monopolist Tallis and his printer Thomas Vautrollier had died, thus creating a more propitious climate for publishing ventures. Since many of the motet texts of the 1589 and 1591 sets are pathetic in tone, it is not surprising that many of them continue and develop the ‘affective-imitative’ vein found in some motets from the 1570s, though in a more concise and concentrated form.  Domine praestolamur (a5) (1589) is a good example of this style, laid out in imitative paragraphs based on subjects which characteristically emphasize the expressive minor second and minor sixth, with continuations which subsequently break off and are heard separately (another technique which Byrd had learnt from his study of Ferrabosco). Byrd evolved a special ‘cell’ technique for setting the petitionary clauses such as ‘miserere mei’ or ‘libera nos Domine’ which form the focal point for a number of the texts. Particularly striking examples of these are the final section of Tribulatio proxima est (a5) (1589) and the multi-sectional Infelix ego (a6) (1591), a large-scale motet which takes its point of departure from Tribue Domine 1575.

There are also a number of compositions which fail to conform to this stylistic pattern. They include three motets which employ the old-fashioned cantus firmus technique as well as the most famous item in the 1589 collection, Ne irascaris Domine (a5) the second part of which is closely modelled on Philip van Wilder’s popular Aspice Domine (a5). A few motets, especially in the 1591 set, abandon traditional motet style and resort to vivid word-painting which reflects the growing popularity of the madrigal (Haec dies a6, 1591). A famous passage from Thomas Morley’s A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) supports the view that the madrigal had superseded the motet in the favour of Catholic patrons, a fact which may explain why Byrd largely abandoned the composition of non-liturgical motets after 1591.

The English song-books of 1588 and 1589
In 1588 and 1589 Byrd also published two collections of English songs. The first, Psalms, Sonnets and Songs of Sadness and Pietie (1588) consists mainly of adapted consort songs, which Byrd, probably guided by commercial instincts, had turned into vocal part-songs by adding words to the accompanying instrumental parts and labelling the original solo voice as ‘the first singing part’. The consort song, which was the most popular form of vernacular polyphony in England in the third quarter of the sixteenth century, was a solo song for a high voice (often sung by a boy) accompanied by a consort of four consort instruments (normally viols). As the title of Byrd’s collection implies, consort songs varied widely in character. Many were settings of metrical psalms, in which the solo voice sings a melody in the manner of the numerous metrical psalm collections of the day (e. g. Sternhold and Hopkins, 1565) with each line prefigured by imitation in the accompanying instruments. Others are dramatic elegies, intended to be performed in the boy-plays which were popular in Tudor London.

Byrd’s 1588 collection, which complicates the form as he inherited it from Robert Parsons, Richard Farrant and others, reflects this tradition. The ‘psalms’ section sets texts drawn from Sternhold’s psalter of 1549 in the traditional manner, while the ‘sonnets and pastorals’ section employs lighter, more rapid motion with crotchet (quarter-note) pulse, and sometimes triple metre (Though Amaryllis dance in green). Poetically, the set (together with other evidence) reflects Byrd’s involvement with the literary circle surrounding Sir Philip Sidney, whose influence at Court was at its height in the early 1580s. Byrd set three of the songs from Sidney’s sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, as well as poems by other members of the Sidney circle, and also included two elegies on Sidney’s death in the Battle of Zutphen in 1586. But the most popular item in the set was the Lullaby (Lullay lullaby) which blends the tradition of the dramatic lament with the cradle-songs found in some early boy-plays and medieval mystery plays[[. It long retained its popularity.  In [[1602 Byrd’s patron Edward Somerset Earl of Worcester, discussing Court fashions in music, predicted that ‘in winter lullaby, an owld song of Mr Birde, wylbee more in request as I thinke’.

The Songs of Sundrie Natures (1589) contain sections in three, four, five and six parts, a format which follows the plan of many Tudor manuscript collections of household music and was probably intended to emulate the madrigal collection Musica transalpina, which had appeared in print the previous year. Byrd’s set contains compositions in a wide variety of musical styles, reflecting the variegated character of the texts which he was setting. The three-part section includes settings of metrical versions of the seven penitential psalms, in an archaic style which reflects the influence of the psalm collections. Other items from the three-part and four-part section are in a lighter vein, employing a line-by-line imitative technique and a predominant crotchet pulse. The five-part section includes vocal part-songs which show the influence of the ‘adapted consort song’ style of the 1588 set but which seem to have been conceived as all-vocal part-songs. Byrd also bowed to tradition by setting two carols in the traditional form with alternating verses and burdens, and even included an anthem, a setting of the Easter prose Christ rising again which also circulated in church choir manuscripts with organ accompaniment.

My Lady Navells Booke (1591)
The 1580s were also a productive decade for Byrd as a composer of instrumental music. On 11 September 1591 John Baldwin, a tenor lay-clerk at St George-s Chapel Windsor and later a colleague of Byrd in the Chapel Royal, completed the copying of My Lady Nevells Booke, a collection of 42 of Byrd’s keyboard pieces which was probably produced under Byrd’s supervision and includes corrections which are thought to be in the composer’s hand. Byrd would almost certainly have published it if the technical means had been available to do so. The dedicatee long remained unidentified, but John Harley’s researches into the heraldic design on the fly-leaf have shown that she was Lady Elizabeth Nevell, the second wife of Sir Henry Nevell of Billingbear in Berkshire, who was a Justice of the Peace and a warden of Windsor Great Park. Under her third married name, Lady Periam, she also received the dedication of Thomas Morley’s two-part conzonets of 1595. The contents show Byrd’s mastery of a wide variety of keyboard forms, though liturgical compositions based on plainsong are not represented. The collection includes a series of ten pavans and galliards in the usual three-strain form with embellished repeats of each strain. (The only exception is the Ninth Pavan, which is a set of variations on the pasamezzo antico bass)

There are indications that the sequence may be a chronological one, for the first pavan is labelled ‘the first that ever hee made’ in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and the Tenth Pavan, which is separated from the others, evidently became available at a late stage before the completion date. It is dedicated to William Petre (the son of Byrd’s patron Sir John Petre) who was only 15 years old in 1591 and could hardly have played it if it had been composed much earlier. The collection also includes two famous pieces of programme music. The Battle, which was apparently inspired by an unidentified skirmish in Elizabeth’s Irish wars, is a sequence of movements bearing titles such as ‘The marche to fight’, ‘The battells be joyned’ and ‘The Galliarde for the victorie’. Although not representing Byrd at his most profound, it achieved great popularity and is of incidental interest for the information which it gives on sixteenth-century English military calls. It is followed by The Barley Break (a mock-battle follows a real one), a light-hearted piece which follows the progress of a game of barley-break, a version of the game now known as ‘piggy in the middle’ played by three couples with a ball. My Lady Nevells Booke also contains two monumental Grounds, and sets of keyboard variations of variegated character, notably the huge set on Walsingham and the popular variations on Sellinger’s Round, Carman’s Whistle and Lord Willoughby’s Welcome Home. The fantasias and voluntaries in Nevell also cover a wide stylistic range, some being austerely contrapuntal (A voluntarie, no. 42)) and others lighter and more Italianate in tone.   Like the five-and six-part consort fantasias, they sometimes feature a gradual increase in momentum after an imitative opening paragraph.

Consort music
The period up to 1591 also saw important additions to Byrd’s output of consort music, some of which has probably been lost. Two magnificent large-sale compositions are the Browning, a set of 20 variations on a popular melody (also known as The leaves be green) which evidently originated as a celebration of the ripening of nuts in autumn, and in an elaborate ground on the formula known as the Goodnight Ground. The smaller-scale fantasias (those a3 and a4) use a light-textured imitative style which owes something to Continental models, while the five and six-part fantasias employ large-scale cumulative construction and allusions to snatches of popular songs A good example of the last type is the Fantasia a6 (No 2) which begins with a sober imitative paragraph before progressively more fragmented textures (working in a quotation from Greensleeves at one point). It even includes a complete three-strain galliard, followed by an expansive coda.

Stondon Massey
In about 1594 Byrd’s career entered a new phase. He was now in his early fifties, and as a far as the Chapel Royal is concerned he seems to have gone into semi-retirement. He moved with his family from Harlington to Stondon Massey, a small village near Chipping Ongar in Essex. His ownership of Stondon Place, where he lived for the rest of his life, was bitterly contested by Joanna Shelley, with whom he engaged in a protracted and unedifying legal dispute lasting about a decade and a half. The main reason for the move was apparently the proximity of Byrd’s patron Sir John Petre (the son of the former Secretary of State Sir William Petre). A wealthy local landowner, Petre was a discreet Catholic who maintained two local manor houses, Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall, the first of which still survives in a much-altered state. Petre held clandestine Mass celebrations, with music provided by his servants, which were subject to the unwelcome attention of spies and paid informers working for the Crown.

Byrd’s acquaintance with the Petre family extended back at least to 1581 (as his surviving autograph letter of that year shows) and he spent two weeks at the Petre household over Christmas in 1589. He was ideally equipped to provide elaborate polyphony to adorn the music making at the Catholic country houses of the time. The continued adherence of Byrd and his family to Catholicism continued to cause him difficulties, though one Jsurviving petition suggests that he was granted permission to practise his relation under licence during the reign of Elizabeth. Nevertheless, he regularly appeared in the quarterly local assizes to pay heavy fines for recusancy. No doubt his wide circle of friends and patrons among the nobility and gentry were able to ensure that he escaped more severe penalties.

Masses
It was evidently at the behest of this circle of friends that Byrd now embarked on a grandiose programme to provide a cycle of liturgical music covering all the principal feasts of the Catholic church calendar. The first stage in this undertaking comprised the three Mass Ordinary cycles (in four, three and five parts), which were published by Thomas East between 1592 and 1595. The editions are undated (dates can be established only by close bibliographic analysis) do not name the printer and consist of only one bifolium per partbook to aid concealment, all signs of secrecy which should remind us that the possession of heterodox books was still highly dangerous. All three works contain retrospective features harking back to the earlier Tudor tradition of Mass settings which had lapsed after 1558, along with others which reflect Continental influence and the liturgical practices of the foreign-trained incoming missionary priests. The Four-Part Mass, which according to Joseph Kerman, was probably the first to be composed, is partly modelled on John Taverner’s Mean Mass, a highly regarded early Tudor setting which Byrd would probably have sung as a choirboy. Taverner’s influence is particularly clear in the scale figures rising successively through a fifth, a sixth and a seventh in Byrd’s setting of the Sanctus.

All three Mass cycles employ other early Tudor features, notably the mosaic of semichoir sections alternating with full sections in the four-part and five-part Masses, the use of a semichoir section to open the Gloria, Credo and Agnus Dei, and the head-motif which links the openings of all the movements of a cycle. However, all three cycles also include Kyries, a rare feature in Sarum Mass settings which usually omitted it because of the use of tropes on festal occasions in the Sarum liturgy. The Kyrie of the Three-Part Mass is set in a simple litany-like style, but the other Kyrie settings employ dense imitative polyphony. A special feature of the Four-Part and Five-Part Masses is Byrd’s treatment of the Agnus Dei, which employ the technique which Byrd had previously applied to the petitionary clauses from the motets of the 1589 and 1591 Cantiones sacrae. The final words ‘dona nobis pacem’ ('grant us peace'), which are set to chains of anguished suspensions in the Four-Part Mass and expressive block homophony in the Five-Part setting almost certainly reflect the aspirations of the troubled Catholic community of the 1590s.

Gradualia
The second stage in Byrd’s programme of liturgical polyphony is formed by the Gradualia, two cycles of motets containing 109 items and published in 1605 and 1607. They are dedicated to two members of the Catholic nobility, Henry Howard Earl of Northampton and Byrd’s own patron Sir John Petre, who had been elevated to the peerage in 1603 under the title Lord Petre of Writtle. The appearance of these two monumental collections of Catholic polyphony reflects the hopes which the recusant community must have harboured for an easier life under the new king James I, who came from a Catholic background himself. Addressing Petre (who is known to have lent him money to advance the printing of the collection), Byrd describes the contents of the 1607 set as ‘blooms collected in your own garden and rightfully due to you as tithes’, thus making explicit the fact that they had formed part of Catholic religious observances in the Petre household.

The greater part of the two collections consists of settings of the Proprium Missae for the major feasts of the church calendar, thus supplementing the Mass Ordinary cycles which Byrd had published in the 1590s. Normally, Byrd includes the Introit, the Gradual, the Alleluia (or Tract in Lent if needed), the Offertory and Communion. The feasts covered include the major feasts of the Virgin Mary (including the votive masses for the Virgin for the four seasons of the church year), All Saints and Corpus Christi (1605) followed by the feasts of the Temporale (Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Ascension, Whitsun and Feast of St Peter and Paul (with additional items for St Peter’s Chains and the Votive Mass of the Blessed Sacrament) in 1607. The verse of the introit is normally set as a semichoir section, returning to full choir scoring for the Gloria Patri. Similar treatment applies to the Gradual verse, which is normally attached to the opening Alleluia to form a single item.  The liturgy requires repeated settings of the word ‘Alleluia’, and Byrd provides a wide variety of different settings forming brilliantly conceived miniature fantasias which are one of the most striking features of the two sets. The Alleluia verse, together with the closing Alleluia, normally form an item in themselves, while the Offertory and the Communion are set as they stand.

In the Roman liturgy there are many texts which appear repeatedly in different liturgical contexts. To avoid having to set the same text twice, Byrd often resorted to a cross-reference or ‘transfer’ system which allowed a single setting to be slotted into a different place in the liturgy. Unfortunately, this practice sometimes causes confusion, partly because normally no rubrics are printed to make the required transfer clear and partly because there are some errors which complicate matters still further. A good example of the transfer system in operation is provided by the first motet from the 1605 set (Suscepimus Deus a5) in which the text used for the Introit has to be reused in a shortened form for the Gradual. Byrd provides a cadential break at the cut-off point.

The 1605 set also contains a number of miscellaneous items which fall outside the liturgical scheme of the main body of the set. As Philip Brett has pointed out, most of the items from the four- and three-part sections were taken from the Primer (the English name for the Book of Hours) thus falling within the sphere of private devotions rather than public worship. These include, inter alia, settings of the four Marian antiphons from the Roman Use, four Marian Vesper hymns set a3, a version of the Litany, the gem-like setting of the Eucharistic hymn Ave verum Corpus, and the Turbarum voces from the St John Passion, as well as a series of miscellaneous items.

In stylistic terms the motets of the Gradualia form a sharp contrast to those of the Cantiones sacrae publications. The vast majority are shorter, with the discursive imitative paragraphs of the earlier motets giving place to double phrases in which the counterpoint, though intricate and concentrated, assumes a secondary level of importance. Long imitative paragraphs are the exception, often kept for final climactic sections in the minority of extended motets. The melodic writing often breaks into quaver (eighth-note) motion, tending to undermine the minim (half-note) pulse with surface detail. Some of the more festive items, especially in the 1607 set, feature vivid madrigalesque word-painting. The Marian hymns from the 1605 Gradualia are set in a light line-by-line imitative counterpoint with crotchet pulse which recalls the three-part English songs from Songs of sundrie natures (1589). For obvious reasons, the Gradualia never achieved the popularity of Byrd’s earlier works. The 1607 set omits several texts, which were evidently too sensitive for publication in the light of the renewed anti-Catholic persecution which followed the failure of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. An interesting contemporary account which sheds light on the circulation of the music between Catholic country houses, refers to the arrest of a French Jesuit named De Noiriche, who was followed from an unidentified country house by spies, apprehended, searched and found to be carrying a copy of the 1605 set. Nevertheless, Byrd felt safe enough to reissue both sets with new title pages in 1610.

Anglican church music
Byrd’s staunch adherence to Catholicism did not prevent him from contributing memorably to the repertory of Anglican church music. Byrd’s small output of church anthems ranges in style from relatively sober early examples (O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our queen (a6) and How long shall mine enemies (a5) ) to other, evidently late works such as Sing joyfully (a6) which is close in style to the English motets of Byrd’s 1611 set, discussed below. Byrd also played a role in the emergence of the new verse anthem, which seems to have evolved in part from the practice of adding vocal refrains to consort songs. Byrd’s four Anglican service settings range in style from the unpretentious Short Service, already discussed, to the magnificent so-called Great Service, a grandiose work which continues a tradition of opulent settings by Richard Farrant, William Mundy and Robert Parsons. Byrd’s setting is on a massive sale, requiring five-part Decani and Cantoris groupings in antiphony[, block homophony and five, six and eight-part counterpoint with verse (solo) sections for added variety. This service setting, which includes an organ part, must have been sung by the Chapel Royal Choir on major liturgical occasions in the early seventeenth century, though its limited circulation suggests that many other cathedral choirs must have found it beyond them. Nevertheless, the source material shows that it was sung in York Minster from c. 1618. The Great Service was in existence by 1606 (the last copying date entered in the earliest surviving manuscript source) and may date back as far as the 1590s.

Psalms, songs and sonnets (1611)
Byrd’s last collection of English songs was Psalms, Songs and Sonnets, published in 1611 (when Byrd was over 70) and dedicated to Francis Clifford Earl of Cumberland, who later also received the dedication of Thomas Campion’s First Book of Songs in 1615. The layout of the set broadly follows the pattern of Byrd’s 1589 set, being laid out in sections for three, four, five and six parts like its predecessor and embracing an even wider miscellany of styles (perhaps reflecting the influence of another Jacobean publication, Michael East’s Third Set of Books (1610). Byrd’s set includes two consort fantasias (a4 and a6) as well as eleven English motets, most of them setting prose texts from the Bible. These include some of his most famous compositions, notably Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles (a6) This day Christ was born (a6) and Have mercy upon me (a6) which employs alternating phrases with verse and full scoring and also circulated as a church anthem.  There are more carols set in verse and burden form as in the 1589 set as well as lighter three and four-part songs in Byrd’s ‘sonnets and pastorals’ style.  Some items are, however, more tinged with madrigalian influence than their counterparts in the earlier set, making clear that the short-lived madrigal vogue of the 1590s had not completely passed Byrd by.

Last works
Byrd also contributed eight keyboard pieces to Parthenia (winter 1612-13), a collection of 21 keyboard pieces engraved by William Hole and containing music by Byrd, John Bull and Orlando Gibbons. It was issued in celebration of the forthcoming marriage of James I's daughter Princess Elizabeth to Frederick V, the Elector of the Palatinate, which took place on 14 February 1613. The three composers are nicely differentiated by seniority, with Byrd, Bull and Gibbons represented respectively by eight, seven and six items. Byrd’s contribution includes the famous Earl of Salisbury Pavan, composed in memory of Robert Cecil Earl of Salisbury, who had died on 24 May 1612, and its two accompanying galliards. Byrd’s last published compositions are four English anthems printed in Sir William Leighbon’s Tears or lamentations of a sorrowful soul (1614).

Byrd remained in Stondon Massey until his death on 4 July 1623, which was noted in the Chapel Royal Check Book in a unique entry describing him as ‘a Father of Musick’. Despite repeated citations for recusancy and swingeing fines, he died a rich man, having rooms at the time of his death at the London home of the Earl of Worcester.

Reputation and reception
Byrd’s output of about 470 compositions amply justifies his reputation as one of the great masters of European Renaissance music. Perhaps his most impressive achievement as a composer was his ability to transform so many of the main musical forms of his day and stamp them with his own identity. Having grown up in an age in which Latin polyphony was largely confined to liturgical items for the Sarum rite, he assimilated and mastered the Continental motet form of his day, employing a highly personal synthesis of English and continental models. He virtually created the Tudor consort and keyboard fantasia, having only the most primitive models to follow. He also raised the consort song, the church anthem and the Anglican service setting to new heights. Finally, despite a general aversion to the madrigal, he succeeded in cultivating secular vocal music in an impressive variety of forms in his two sets of 1589 and 1591.

Byrd enjoyed a high reputation among English musicians, especially in the earlier stages of his career. Despite the failure of the Cantiones of 1575 some of his other collections sold well, while Elizabethan scribes such as the Oxford academic Robert Dow, the Windsor lay clerk John Baldwin and a school of scribes working for the Norfolk country gentleman Sir Edward Paston copied his music extensively. Dow included Latin distichs and quotations in praise of Byrd in his manuscript collection of music (GB Och 984-8) while Baldwin included a long doggerel poem in his commonplace book (GB Lbm Roy App 24 d 2) ranking Byrd at the head of the musicians of his day:

Yet let not straingers bragg, nor they these soe commende, For they may now geve place and sett themselves behynde,

An Englishman, by name, William BIRDE for his skill

Which I shoulde heve sett first, for soe it was my will,

Whose greater skill and knowledge dothe excelle all at this time

And far to strange countries abrode his skill dothe shyne...

In 1597 Byrd’s pupil Thomas Morley dedicated his treatise A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke to Byrd in flattering terms, though he may have intended to counterbalance this in the main text by some sharply satirical references to a mysterious ‘Master Bold’. In The Compleat Gentleman (1622) Sir Henry Peacham praised Byrd in lavish terms as a composer of sacred music:

‘For Motets and musick of piety and devotion, as well as for the honour of our Nation, as the merit of the man, I prefer above all our Phoenix M[aster] William Byrd, whom in that kind, I know not whether any may equall, I am sure none excel, even by the judgement of France and Italy, who are very sparing in the commendation of strangers, in regard of that conceipt they hold of themselves. His Cantiones Sacrae, as also his Gradualia, are mere Angelicall and Divine; and being of himself naturally disposed to Gravity and Piety, his vein is not so much for leight Madrigals or Canzonets, yet his Virginella and some others in his first Set, cannot be mended by the best Italian of them all.’

Finally, and most intriguingly, it has been argued that a reference to ‘the bird of loudest lay’ in Shakespeare’s mysterious allegorical poem The Phoenix and the Turtle may be to the composer. The poem as a whole has been interpreted as an elegy for the Catholic martyr St Anne Line, who was executed on 27 February 1601 for harbouring priests.

Although Byrd had a major reputation in England during his lifetime, his music was in many respects curiously uninfluential. Although his pupils included Peter Philips and Thomas Tomkins, both of whom were active as keyboard composers, the native virginal school to which he had contributed so much went into sharp decline with a number of deaths in the 1620s and never recovered. Thomas Morley, Byrd’s other major composing pupil, devoted himself to the cultivation of the madrigal, a form in which Byrd himself took little interest. The native tradition of Latin music which Byrd had done so much to keep alive more or less died with him, while consort music underwent a huge change of character at the hands of a new generation of professional musicians at the Jacobean and Caroline court. Ironically in view of Byrd’s own religious beliefs, it was his Anglican church music which came closest to establishing a continuous tradition, at least in the sense that some of it continued to be performed in choral foundations after the Restoration and into the eighteenth century. Byrd’s exceptionally long lifespan meant that he lived into an age in which many of the forms of vocal and instrumental music which he had made his own had lost their appeal to most musicians. Despite the efforts of eighteenth and nineteenth-century antiquarians, the reversal of this judgement had to wait for the pioneering work of twentieth-century scholars from E. H. Fellowes onwards. In more recent times Joseph Kerman, Oliver Neighbour, Philip Brett, John Harley, Richard Turbet, Alan Brown and others have made major contributions to increasing our understanding of Byrd’s life and music.

BOOKS P. Brett, William Byrd and his Contemporaries (Berkeley, 2007) A. Brown and R. Turbet (gen. eds), Byrd Studies (Cambridge, 1992) E. H. Fellowes, William Byrd (rev. edn, London, 1948) J. Harley, William Byrd, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (Aldershot, 1997) J. Kerman, The Masses and motets of William Byrd (London, 1981) J. Kerman, William Byrd, New Grove 2, 2001) O. Neighbour, The Consort and Keyboard Music of William Byrd London, 1978) R. Turbet, William Byrd, A Guide to Research (New York, 1987)

EDITIONS The Byrd Edition (gen. ed. P. Brett), Vols 1-17 (London, 1977-2004) A. Brown (ed.) William Byrd, Keyboard Music (Musica Britannica 27-28, London, 1971)

For a wide selection of scores and sound files, see http://www.stainer.co.uk/byrd.html and http://www.midiworld.com/byrd.htm

—Preceding unsigned comment added by D Humphreys (talk • contribs) 10:26, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

Note: Now that Humphreys' article has been transferred back to the main article page and had several subsequent edits there, I have taken the liberty of putting the above text in blockquotes. The alternative might be simply to delete the above (now superceced) text. -- Chuck (talk) 19:03, 5 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I took the liberty of highlighting a couple of suspected typoes in your text.  For an informed critique you must look to others, however!


 * As far as wiki standards are concerned, I'm not sure what that entails.  I don't suppose anyone reading this knows the complete package.   Most of my own wiki life is spent translating articles on cars.   Short ones (the articles).   But your text would be easier on the eye if it incorporated subheadings.   That way, too, you also get AUTOMATICALLY an index of section headings at the top of the article.   You're the best person to know what the subheadings are.   Presumably when you prepared the piece, you grouped it into sections, (1) by subject or (2) chronologically or (3) some of each or (4) some other way, just as one does with any essay format work.   Why not enter the section headings and see how it looks?   I've done three here, but mine are probably the wrong sub-headings.   Still, that shows how it might look in terms of lay-out.   There is, after that, probably scope for entering lots of links to other entries, but I'd leave starting on that (tho I seem to have done one for Ongar) for a bit, pending evidence of something approaching wikilevel-consensus on the text


 * Regards Charles01 (talk) 10:23, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I have now added sub-headings and broken up the long paragraphs somewhat. I have a few footnotes for it (not sure how do do them but I can find out by reading other articles). How is it now?

David —Preceding unsigned comment added by D Humphreys (talk • contribs) 17:40, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

Not quite happy with it yet. I shall go back to it in the next few days and add a few footnotes. Also the header (not by me) is inaccurate and should be replaced So should the sound file, which is of a spurious work and not very well performed in any caseD Humphreys (talk) 15:44, 6 September 2008 (UTC).

William Byrd remembered at Stondon Massey
Possibly not totally encyclopaedic to mention this, but on the first (generally) Tuesday in July the Stondon Singers, a small amateur (but most years passable+) choir perform a William Byrd memorial concert in the church at Stondon Massey. Charles01 (talk) 16:57, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Composer project review
It's unclear to me from the above discussion how stable this article is; I decided to review this version as part of the Composers project review of its B-class articles. The beginning of the article is mighty confusing, and does not read like the beginning of a biography. I reluctantly give this a B rating, because it appears to have a lot of good scholarhip, but needs a lot of wordsmithing and citation. Read my detailed review on the comments page. Leave comments or questions here or on my talk page.  Magic ♪piano 17:09, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Byrd's English Anthem texts
I'm quite prepared to discover that my Byrd scholarship is some way off the pace, but I can't find anywhere in the literature a mention of the fact that a number of the texts set in the 1611 Psalmes, Songs, and Sonnets... are taken from the Little Hours of the Blessed Virgin - properly The Primer, or Office of the blessed Virgin Marie (1599, and many editions thereafter). John Harley (William Byrd, Gentleman of the Chapel Royal) mentions that the texts are "close to the Douay-Reims Bible" and other journal articles I've seen are no clearer than this. I'd be surprised if no-one had noticed this - after all, we've known since the publication of the Gradualia volumes in Philip Brett's Byrd edition (prefaces also reprinted in William Byrd and his Contemporaries) that the Marian hymns and some other Latin texts come from this publication - but no mention of the English ones. The texts in question are Come let us rejoice unto our Lord, Make ye joy to God, Praise our Lord all ye Gentiles, Sing ye to our Lord and Turn our captivity. In this regard, this article is doubly wrong in stating that the anthems set prose texts from the Bible: surely the Psalms are poetry and, while of course from the Bible, it's at one remove. This "discovery", if it is, has some bearing on the dating of these anthems; there were liturgical "Primers" in circulation almost from the invention of printing, but the earliest I can find with these psalm translations is the 1599 one, the work of one Richard Verstegan. So either Byrd had access to pre-publication copies, or these anthems were not composed until the 17th century. Somebody either please shoot me down or tell me I'm onto something. If this really is "original research", then I'll take it off here and put it in a letter to Early Music or something. - DF --Byrdnuts (talk) 11:24, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, very interesting. Joseph Kerman was the first to observe that the translations used by Byrd for the Biblical texts are close to those of the Douai-Rheims Bible, an additional link between him and the Catholic community. The only non-Biblical prose text is 'This day Christ was born' (a6) which is an English translation of the Magnificat antiphon for Vespers at the Feast of the Nativity (Christmas Day) (a fact curiously unmentioned in The Byrd Edition. I don't know if it is possible to prove that Byrd used the 1599 Primer as his source.  By the way, in describing the biblical texts as 'prose' I was using the word in contradistinction to 'verse'.  I am well aware that the psalms are poetry.86.31.132.156 (talk) 16:58, 27 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, final point taken - I didn't mean my comment to sound dismissive. "Poetry from the Bible" would sound distinctly odd!  Your description also serves to distinguish these texts from the dreaded metrical psalms.  Kerman does indeed draw quite an extensive comparison between Byrd's texts and those of the Douay Bible (in The Elizabethan Madrigal - funny place to be doing any such thing, you might say), while commenting that perhaps Byrd had an early copy of a Douay psalter in front of him.  Perhaps he did, if any such thing existed - which doesn't alter the fact that the settings I mention above come word-for-word from Verstegan's Primer.  Again, perhaps pre-publication copies of this were in circulation - but, if we don't know this, isn't the burden of proof on anyone claiming that Byrd didn't use the 1599 Primer?  Also, I think it's true that there are no earlier MS sources of these anthems - all of which (for me anyway) point to a post-1607 composition date (after he'd cleared his desk of the Gradualia).

--Byrdnuts (talk) 21:53, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Wow
Oh my goodness, what an unexpectedly detailed article. Well done to the contributors! Antienne (talk) 11:19, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

From the author of the (rather flawed and incomplete) original Byrd bio: thanks to D Humphreys for fixing things up!

67.159.94.1 (talk) 22:44, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Excellent.Shtove (talk) 02:53, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

Calendar query
I presume the date 4 July 1623 that appears in all refs as his date of death is according to the Julian calendar in use in England at that time. Which would equate to 14 July 1623 in the Gregorian calendar that was then being used in France, Italy, Spain, Poland and a few other places. Correct? --  Jack of Oz   [your turn]  00:59, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, correct. After the Roman Catholic Church changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in (I think) 1582. much of Southern (Catholic) Europe changed to the new calender by skipping eleven days. Protestant countries (including England) ignored the change and there is therefore an eleven-day gap between England and most of Catholic Europe which lasted until England (by then Britain) finally made the change in 1752 by omitting eleven days from September. Some of the more 'challenged' members of the population thought the change had shortened their lives by eleven days, and adopted the famous rallying cry 'Give us back our eleven days!' — Preceding unsigned comment added by D Humphreys (talk • contribs) 17:57, 12 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks, belatedly. I'm well aware of the history of the very protracted changeover from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.  The gap between the two calendars was initially (1582) only 10 days.  This increased to 11 days in 1700, to 12 days in 1800 and 13 days in 1900.  In Byrd's time, the gap was still only 10 days.  What I wanted confirmation of is that the "4th July" reference in the sources is to a date in the Julian calendar.  If so, this would equate to 14 July in the Gregorian.  But if "4th July" has already been converted to Gregorian, then it would mean it's equivalent to 24 June Julian.  --  Jack of Oz   [Talk]  00:13, 8 December 2012 (UTC)

Recent edits (July 2015
I have just been through the article, supplied some footnote references and slightly expanded and corrected the text. I'm sorry if the formatting is incorrect, but I haven't time to make any further changes now. Perhaps one of the moderators would be so kind as to reedit it if he things it necessary?

David Humphreys


 * If this means you do not plan instantly to revert the corrections again (as you have now done twice), I would be happy to do them once more. I would rather not waste my valuable time, however, if you are just going to play silly beggars.—Jerome Kohl (talk) 15:58, 2 July 2015 (UTC)

Needs work
I'm not trying to be funny, clever, rude, dismissive of others' efforts etc etc etc. BUT, I'm just thinking, is this article better than nothing? I mean, I suppose it is, and you can fillet out of it quite a lot of useful info, but really, the style, the irrelevant content (e.g. Byrd's problems with property ownership ...) I just don't know. Obviously it must have worked for a 1911 audience but I do have serious doubts about how useful it is now. And yes I know the obvious Wikipedian answer is that I ought to rewrite it, thank you very much, but I don't have time and I know NOTHING about Byrd except he wrote TITROJ and that's about it, so it's not me! (Maybe it's you, dear reader!) But I do like a good moan. So what do you think - better than nothing??? Nevilley 10:32 Nov 30, 2002 (UTC)
 * Comment: It might help other readers to know that by TITROJ Nevilley meant This Is the Record of John – which is actually by Orlando Gibbons. There you go, then. DBaK (talk) 18:52, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Yes the above is right and makes sense someone needs to fix it because this article is no good. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.102.83.38 (talk) 01:17, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Byrd revisions
As noted in the revision history, I've (foolishly?) decided to flush the 1911 encyclopedia article on Byrd and replace it with something else. This is a potted biography I wrote for some recent concert notes, which I'm happy to see go into the public domain. The main focus of the concert was B's Latin sacred music, so the bio dwells on that more than on his equally worthy English and instrumental music. Please bring your additions, deletions, merciless edits, etc.

Camembert: I was skeptical at first about the revised birthdate, but it's genuine. See John Harley,  William Byrd: Gentleman of the Chapel Royal (1997), and the newest edition of the ''Grove Dictionary of Music. ''

Nevilley: Isn't TITROJ by Gibbons? Still good fun for us altos though.

Any input is appreciated. Kerry 


 * Note: TITROJ = This Is the Record of John – by Orlando Gibbons. DBaK (talk) 18:52, 1 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Wow! Major major MAJOR improvement! Well done!


 * And yes it is by Gibbons, I can't believe I wrote that, I shall plead drunkenness if it ever goes to court. It's particularly sad when you note the context: I know NOTHING about Byrd except he wrote TITROJ - well, DUH, as my children say, and indeed DUH again. (Actually I think I may have been thinking of Ne Irascaris which is my other favourite peice of music of that time, but it does show you how badly misfiled things can get. Oh and now I suppose someone will tell me that actually NI is by, I don't know, Hildergard or Ligeti or someone, and on it goes ... ) But back to Byrd - this is a great article and congrats on it. --Nevilley 11:21, 30 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Note: TITROJ = This Is the Record of John – by Orlando Gibbons. DBaK (talk) 18:52, 1 November 2021 (UTC)


 * Yes, a great improvement, and thanks for the note on his birthdate. --Camembert


 * Best composer article I've read on Wikipedia. And I've found quite a few which could do with similarly drastic treatment... Wilus 09:08, 15 Sep 2004 (UTC)


 * I am not a Byrd expert by any means but this article does seem to me to be passable but not much more. It does leave a lot out, as someone noted, and most of it still has the somewhat superficial feel of basic program notes. (Not that there's anything wrong with that...) I would expand it but as I say this is not my area of expertise, just an area of great interest and experience as a performer. --Wspencer11 (talk to me...) 17:35, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

Assessment comment
Substituted at 10:36, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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